IndyBlog

El Paso County ranks 364th out of all counties nationally

A post by Pueblo PULP tipped us off to a cool data set put together by the New York Times' new blog The Upshot. For each county in the country, it looked at the percentage of residents with a bachelor's degree, median household income, obesity, life expectancy, unemployment rate and disability rate. Each county was then cumulatively ranked.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the greatest cluster of counties doing the worst comes in the Appalachian Mountains, where the coal-mining industry has been annihilated, leaving the occasional chemical company and its occasional chemical spill as a replacement. On the other end, six of the 10 best performing counties come in the ring around Washington, D.C.

What follows is a quick comparison between El Paso, Pueblo and Teller counties. For reference, Douglas County ranked highest in the state — 13 out of 3,135 counties — where 55 percent of the population has a bachelor's degree yielding a median income of $101,108.